GRDECL format describes a grid with hexahedral cells with a very special style created by the company Schlumberger for Eclipse. GRDECL means “Grid Eclipse”. GRDECL format is used to describe the modeling of an oil field. This format stores the properties of each of the hexahedral cells which define the geometry of the field. Tens of properties such as permeability and porosity are stored for each one of the cells. This format uses the geometries shown in the following figure called “Block Centered” and “Corner Point”. The major complication of one GRDECL format reader is to analyze the “Corner Point” geometry.

For this project we have designed an unstructured grid reader compatible with VTK. The Visualization ToolKit (VTK) is an open source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization used by thousands of researchers and developers around the world (www.vtk.org).

Our reader named vtkGRDECLUnstructuredGridReader produces as output, an object of type vtkUnstructuredGrid (VTK hexahedral topology) that can be viewed using several “Mappers” of VTK.

The figure below shows the Johansen reservoir on the left, which can be downloaded from the “The Johansen Data Set” homepage.

On the right of the same figure, several layers of a cube of simulation are shown (layers 10-55). This cube was stored in GRDECL format.

The next figure shows a zoom to the Johansen reservoir on the left, showing the first four layers of cells of the reservoir model. The color palette has been inverted with respect to the previous figure. To the right another oil field is shown along with five wells.

This project belongs to PetroSynapsis software.